


to plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow

by jokeperalta



Category: Bodyguard (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Death Fix, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Extended Metaphors, F/M, Gardens & Gardening, Julia Montague Lives, basically ignores canon entirely after episode 3, because fuck you jed, everything you see is metaphors, is it in character? who knows, reaaaaaaally extended metaphors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-30
Updated: 2019-09-30
Packaged: 2020-11-08 13:35:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20836337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jokeperalta/pseuds/jokeperalta
Summary: David notices the window box, the evening after she’s discharged from the hospital: mostly wheelchair bound, tired, picking half-heartedly at her food.The stone trough outside her kitchen window is something she herself has never noticed before, much less tried to do anything with. She imagines the Victorian architect added the feature to the windows on her building to encourage some green thumbs in its residents, and probably hadn’t banked on it being occupied by a workaholic politician who notably once managed to kill the cactus on her windowsill in her student halls of residence.Her thumbs are the pastiest white.





	to plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow

**Author's Note:**

> [strolls in twelve months later with Starbucks] hiiiii guys!!
> 
> So... the germ of this fic came from a throwaway line in a previous fic I wrote whilst in a haze of anger and bitterness just after Jed pulled his fuckery: ‘Vicky and the kids paid the first year’s rent on a allotment plot for his birthday and he tends that twice a week. It’s nice. It’s peaceful.’
> 
> I liked the idea so much that from it I managed to come up with around 5k of pretentiousness and extended metaphor that I hope at least someone out there enjoys because it has been a real labour of love for about 8 months now. 
> 
> As I’m sure you’ll agree once you read this- I have fairly beaten the nice idea I had to death here. But I remained committed to it and I’m actually relatively, _mostly_ happy with how it turned out and am so very tired of seeing it in the notes app of my phone so... yeah...
> 
> As always, beyond googling, I know very little about gardening (I know, I know), physiotherapy, trauma or a lot of the other topics touched on by this fic so I can only hope I did them justice

David notices the window box, the evening after she’s discharged from the hospital: mostly wheelchair bound, tired, picking half-heartedly at her food.

The stone trough outside her kitchen window is something she herself has never noticed before, much less tried to do anything with. She imagines the Victorian architect added the feature to the windows on her building to encourage some green thumbs in its residents, and probably hadn’t banked on it being occupied by a workaholic politician who notably once managed to kill the cactus on her windowsill in her student halls of residence.

Her thumbs are the pastiest white.

“I’m gonna plant it for you,” he promises, closing the window behind him.

“Mm,” Julia mumbles, non-commitally.

It sounds a lot like every other thing people have said to her today: sincerely made but notably vague promises about what her near-future might look like. Mostly enthusiastically expressed by nurses and physios to try to make her feel better about the months (maybe years) of relearning to walk more than five steps in front of her without collapsing, with no absolute guarantee that she ever will.

(She should have been Prime Minister by now.)

David has been the one exception so far. He hasn’t said much today, just held her hand and listened intently to the medical staff about her painkiller dosage and next check up. What he has said has been refreshingly grounded in the present, in the next immediate task— not referencing the gargantuan effort ahead of her (them?) at all.

But his promise now seems like too much to even commit to. Too much to let him commit to, actually. Putting down roots in the very literal sense.

She forgets about it.

-

And yet.

There’s newspaper spread all over her kitchen floor a few weeks later, David sitting cross-legged beside a plastic planter filled from a bag of soil. Bags of random seeds on the kitchen island, bottle of plant food on the coffee table

Julia wheels herself in -bone-tired from the first of many, many more physiotherapist sessions to come- and looks upon the explosion in a garden centre her flat has become.

“Sorry,” he says. “I wanted to be done by the time you got back. I’ll clean all this up.”

“You’re... gardening?”

Her brain is more or less the consistency of treacle- or that’s how it feels, trying to connect the dots of the scene in front of her with her normal reality.

He points behind him with the small trowel in his hand at the kitchen window. “The window box. I said I’d plant it for you.”

There’s still a petty part of her that’s annoyed he’s made a mess of her ordered environment, but mostly she’s touched he actually followed through. Someone doing what they say they’ll do has been an all too rare thing in the past few years.

“How was physio?” he asks.

“Fine.” Julia lies smoothly. A necessary trait for a politician.

David wanted to come with her but she insisted he didn’t. And she’s glad he wasn’t there, in the end.

The whole thing was a fucking humiliation. Watching her own body fail her at the most basic level, over and over again, even in the simplest of things. Her physiotherapist was quick to reassure her that where she’s at is completely normal for someone with the degree of injuries she suffered, and that it will all come with time—all in that warm, peppy and honestly quite grating voice of his.

She changes the subject quickly.

“What are you planting?

“Herbs, mostly. A couple of flowering plants around the edges —make it look pretty.”

“I never knew you liked gardening.”

Not surprising in itself. They spent the majority of their time having sex before the bomb. There’s still so much they don’t know about each other.

David shrugs. “Haven’t had a chance to do it in a few years. I had this big plan to do up the garden when I lived with Vick and the kids--“ He stops himself mid-sentence. Glances at her. “Never got around to it.”

She wonders about that a lot. Whether, given the chance, he’d rather still be with Vicky, living out his nuclear family dreams with his kids and his garden. Instead he must have to make do with her and a puny window box.

“Our garden in Glasgow was my dad’s pride and joy,” he continues. “The only times I remember feeling like he wanted me around when when we did the garden together.”

Sometimes she forgets to fully comprehend his life before her, that his past is every bit as rich and vivid as her own— if not more so. Not intentionally, of course. Never intentionally.

Roger accused her once of being self-involved, and it’s the only insult he threw at her -during the constant shouting match that their marriage became- that she’s never been able to fully refute.

Ever since they met David’s life has been defined in relation to her, but at least then he was getting paid for it, then later getting laid and paid. It’s hard to imagine what he’s even getting out of this strange, undefined little set up they have now.

_He needs this_,  she thinks suddenly.  _And I need him._

Later on, Julia sees some trodden in compost on her cream carpet. It seems a small price to pay.

-

Considering originally she’d thought she was just humouring him in attempting to reclaim his rare happy memories with his father, Julia becomes more invested in the little plants than she ever thought she would.

Wheeling herself over to the kitchen window each morning to inspect the soil for emerging shoots becomes the thing that gets out of bed in the morning when he isn’t there.

Something about their slow crawl up through the dirt into the light is quite compelling.

-

A senior minister had warned Julia when she first joined the Cabinet, as bright-eyed and ambitious fresh meat, that you either got a Government portfolio or you got a degree of privacy. Both simply wasn’t an option.

A long lens photographer apparently managed to catch them unawares going out one morning— the first time they’d walked anywhere together that wasn’t to a waiting car since she got out of hospital.

And she remembers that day, as it happens.

It had been David’s idea, and she’d been aware of how particularly haggard she must have looked at the time -pushed in a wheelchair, no make up, hair unstyled- but she’d tried to put it to the back of her mind for his sake.

He doesn’t like being cooped up. And they couldn’t stay in her apartment forever, much as it appealed to her.

It’s only when some shitty excuse for a journalist at The Sun runs the pictures that it really hits her though: David, looking for all the world like he’s just stepped off a Hollywood film set. And then the eye comes to her, hunched over in her chair with a blanket on her knees- as though she’s some doddering, aging relative that David’s been forced to take out of the care home for the day.

Even if the contrast hadn’t been immediately obvious, The Sun’s chosen headline spells it out quite succinctly.

_WHO TOOK THE PHWOAR OUT OF COUGAR MONTAGUE?_

They’ve even gone to the trouble of including a useful timeline of what she looked like a various points in her life - getting hold of her graduation photo and even a fucking wedding portrait, somehow.

All to illustrate how deeply unfuckable she’s become. How ridiculous it is that some like like David has chained himself to someone like her.

The article causes a shit storm on Twitter.

Feminists, disability rights campaigners, bloggers and op-ed writers all weigh in on how repulsive it is. Julia appreciates the support, and that there’s a larger issue than just her feelings at stake— about the way women and disability are depicted in the media that needs to be talked about.

It doesn’t stop her from wishing everyone would just _stop_ though. Just so those humiliating pictures might slip out of the news cycle. Then maybe she wouldn’t have be reminded that they existed in the world. 

She isn’t a particularly vain person. What the gutter press says about her has never been and will never be important. It’s only that this time, they echo something she’s been trying to ignore in the back of her own mind since she woke up in hospital and saw David sleeping by her bedside. Something she feels when she can’t do the things that were so easy before, when she sees her reflection in a glass window.

The newsagent down the road gives her a funny look when she wheels herself in to buy a copy. She ignores it, and wheels herself back to her apartment with it in her lap, next to the growing sick feeling in her stomach.

By the time she makes it inside - hands shaking as she tried to get the key in her door from the stupid angle her wheelchair has her at- she’s sweating, tired, and more than ready to have a long cry to herself.

_FORMER Home Secretary Julia Montague, 42, was pictured out for the first time since leaving hospital last Sunday, with her former bodyguard and toyboy lover David Budd, 32, in tow. Or should we say, with long-suffering Dave towing her?_

Every word is crass and chosen for its cruelty, she’s sure. The very lowest common denominator of tabloid journalism. Julia hates it more because it’s working.

Even crying isn’t as satisfying as she thought it would be. All she manages is dry heaving sobs, feeling like she’s choking on her own breaths. 

Like most other things, it’s pointless- so she stops. She stares out the window instead, blank and too bone-tired to even look at anything in particular. And  outside, it’s started to rain. It starts slowly, then gets harder. It batters the tiny shoots coming up in the window box, pushing them back down into the soil.

“Julia?” 

She hadn’t been expecting him so early. Or maybe time has just gotten away from her. She isn’t sure.

He finds her in the dark, next to the window in the kitchen. God only knows what she must look like. She hates being like this, hates him seeing her like this even more. 

He plucks the newspaper out of her lap. He casts a cursory glance over it before rolling it up and aiming it at her recycling bin like a paper plane.

“What’re you looking at that shite for?”

“Thought I better read it for myself,” she says, smiling tightly. “If this is what people think of me these days.”

It’s an attempt at a joke that gets mangled between her brain and her mouth, and comes out instead sounding small and sad. 

“That isn’t what people think of you. That’s what some pervy wanker at a scummy newspaper thinks will sell copies. You know that.”

Julia nods numbly. “Suppose so.”

She attempts to wheel herself around him,but he steps in her path- evidently not satisfied with her answer. 

“Julia.”

“David,” Julia parrots pertly. It’s annoying, and she knows it.

He looks at her like he doesn’t know what to do with her. And God, how she has him trapped. 

It’s hard to think, it’s hard to breathe. The tears she couldn’t sum up before he got in certainly choose their moment.

“Julia,” he says again but this time she can only hear sadness.  _Pity_. It’s cloying and it sticks in her throat like being force-fed treacle and all she can think is  _get out get out get out_. From under his gaze, from his life.

She can deal with mockery, she can deal with scorn, even the tabloid garbage she can get past- in her own time, in her own way- but the one thing she cannot abide is pity. 

Especially not from him. 

Not ever from him.

“It’s fine, David,” she snaps. “I don’t need your pity, or anyone else’s for that matter. I never have. So if that’s why you’re here, I’d really rather you just fucked off now and stopped wasting both our time.”

Her words reverberate around the kitchen like she’s just slapped him but he just stands there silently. Julia refuses to look at him. 

“Is that what you think of me? That I pity you?”

What she wants is to accuse him, to bait him, to get him so mad at her that he really will fuck off this time—back to Vicky, maybe. Back to the life he really wants,  _deserves_. The lump in her throat is too choking to form a decent barb though.

He kneels in front of her now, so he’s below her. Julia doesn’t want to look at him but his hand coaxes her chin up. Tears slip from her eyes on onto his hand, until he wipes them away with his thumb. It’s so soft that she can’t stand it. It’s anathema. 

“You listen to me,” he says. He’s fervent in a way she’s never seen before, almost at the point of desperation. It disarms her completely. “I need you to believe me -believe _in_ me \- not all the shitty noise out there. You need to stop treating me like I’m going to up and leave you any second, because I’m not.”

“But I can’t  _giv__e_ you anything,” Julia protests. “We can’t go out unless you push me around in this stupid chair, we can’t even have sex properly, and then there’s this— God, you could do  anything, David, be anyone, be _with_ anyone and you know that. So why—”

He cuts her off before she can say it, shaking his head. “Do you remember that room before the bomb?” He holds her hands tightly in her lap, like he’s afraid she’ll slip away if he lets go. She’s scared of that too. “‘I want you right beside me, not because it’s your job, but because it’s our choice’ - you said that to me, remember? And this is my choice. _You're_ my choice.”

He leans up and kisses her forehead tenderly. 

“They only pick on your scars because they can see them,” he murmurs in her ear.

She remembers: listening to him break down similarly behind their adjoining door, her lungs still recovering from his hands tightening around her throat. No longer scared  of him, but of what it meant. How much she wanted to help and how little she actually could. How they could possibly get past it.

And how she’d wanted to be with him anyway.

David lets her lie in his lap later, her head on a cushion on his knees. He runs his fingers through her hair, carding his fingertips over her scalp, while they watch something mindless on TV.

“The rain’ll help the window box. They’ll come up soon, that’ll be nice,” David comments out of the blue.

“Hope so,” Julia mumbles.

And she does. It’s just hard to imagine that anything could survive the battering outside.

-

But they do survive. Even when it seems impossible. 

Before she knows it, the stems have grown strong and the leaves unfurl, a little more each time she looks. If she has her kitchen window open and breathes in deeply she starts to imagine she can smell the herbs, see colour in the flowering plants that have barely begun to bud.

-

“And who’s this?” Her physiotherapist, Mikey, says. “We’ve never had a guest with us before.”

Julia has to grudgingly admit he’s very good at his job, even if he looks like a twelve year old bunking off school, and although she tries not to be judgmental, she still struggles to take a grown man who genuinely wants people to refer to him as ‘Mikey’ seriously.

“David,” he introduces himself, holding out his hand. “I’m Julia’s partner.”

Julia’s never heard him refer to himself that way before. She certainly isn’t opposed to it.

“Well, it’s lovely to meet you, David.” Mikey shakes his hand so energetically Julia’s a little afraid David’ll need a physiotherapist too by the time Mikey’s done with him. “The more, the merrier as my mum says- and that applies to my physio room too!”

David shoots her a look when he gets his hand back, a little alarmed at Mikey’s overwhelming enthusiasm. Long since used to Mikey and his devout belief in the power of positive energy, Julia just nods sagely.

This is the first time she’s asked David to be at one of her physio sessions. She knows it’s not his first rodeo, having had some himself after his last tour in Afghanistan and seeing friends going through it. Yet until recently, she couldn’t stand the thought of him being there. Him bearing witness to her broken body and the arduous process that it’s taking to heal her.

But now—

She thinks it might help. She wants to borrow his calm and his steadfast focus. She wants to look around the room when she’s tired and annoyed with how fucking long this is all taking and see him, on her side.

Julia has never been a very patient person. She wants results, obvious and quantifiable. She’s used to being able to demand them of others and of herself, but her own body doesn’t play ball in the way her underlings and colleagues used to. The progress Mikey tells her she’s making isn’t enough: it still feels like she’s barely past square one sometimes.

David smiled when she asked him to come with her, like she was finally letting him in on a secret that he already knew. 

And as it turns out, she was right: having him there does help. He doesn’t say much, but what does say seems to always be what she needs to hear.

She’s not sure how he always manages to do that.

“I could not be happier with your progress, Julia,” Mikey says when he sits them down behind his cluttered desk at the end. “I know you feel like you’re not getting anywhere fast, but physio is a journey and you’re doing really, really well. The only area I can suggest for improvement is only for you to view things with a little less.... cynicism, let’s say- you’d be surprised how far a positive attitude can get you.”

Julia prickles. If an aide had ever dared to suggest she had a bad attitude they’d have been demoted out of her office by the time they finished speaking, but Julia smiles tightly and bites her tongue because he’s not an aide and she knows he means well. 

Cynicism, indeed. It’s hard to not be cynical after losing mobility, a career that had been toiled over for years, and very, very nearly dying all in one fell swoop. A few seconds for a bomb to detonate that would likely define the rest of her life in one way or another. 

David squeezes her hand.

Mikey ploughs on regardless as he is wont to do. “We are getting there, Julia, hand on heart.”

“We are,” David says quietly. “We’re gonna be fine.”

-

“So Ella has a new school science project,” David tells her one night around a mouthful of pasta.

“Which is?”

“They’re growing sunflowers. Ella’s very excited.”

Julia’s met Ella now, and Charlie. Only a handful of times, and mostly in passing. She’s never considered herself to be much the maternal type, and her actual experience with children is largely limited to photo ops at nurseries and schools as an MP, kissing the heads of babes as it were- but they are very sweet children. She sees a lot of David in them both, in different ways. That’s enough for her to love them.

“She wants to be a gardener when she grows up now. She gets to bring it home after six weeks.”

“She inherited your green fingers, I take it?”

David rolls his eyes when she gestures towards the window box. “I love the bones of that girl but she’s easily distracted. I’ve told her she needs to take care of it on her own and I won’t do it for her but she’ll be interested in something else a week after she brings it home, I guarantee it.“

“She might surprise you.”

“Doubt it. I have idea where she’ll even put it- Vick’s back garden is paved over now and my flat doesn’t even have a patch of grass.”

“I’d say she could use my window box, but it’s looking pretty full these days,” Julia says, with some pride. 

Even when David’s not been here, she’s managed to keep them alive, watering and deadheading and attaching bamboo canes to the stems with string to help them grow. 

She finally understands why people commit themselves to their gardens. It’s relaxing, it’s ritualistic, and most importantly it takes her mind off other things. She can lose an entire afternoon in the routine of it sometimes, and then David’s home and she’s gotten through another day that she wasn’t sure about when she woke up that morning and her legs felt like lead and her arms ached from the previous day of lugging herself around in her chair.

Not to mention her therapist nods with approval when she mentions the window box in their sessions, so that must mean something.

-

Still, the conversation about Ella sticks in her head whilst they wash up after dinner and get ready to walk.

Her physiotherapist is ‘chuffed to bits’ (his words) with her progress and recommended that she step up the walking on crutches to get the muscles in her legs going again, so that’s what they do each night- up and down her road a few times, sometimes stopping in for a drink at the trendy bar down the road.

“Maybe we should find space for it,” Julia ventures. She looks ahead into the approaching dusk instead of at him. “If yours and mine don’t have it.”

“Hm?”

“Ella’s sunflower. I was just thinking- maybe we could move somewhere with a garden.”

David stops and looks at her. Her sweaty hands readjust around the handles of her crutches. Her atrophied muscles scream in protest at the sudden cease of momentum, but that’s nothing new.

“‘We’? You wanna move in together?”

“Is there a sense in paying two London rents when you’re with me most nights anyway?” Julia retreats into practicalities to avoid the emotional baggage that comes with the concept of ‘moving into together’ that she can hear in his voice. “I’m not attached to my flat. And I certainly don’t need to be in the city anymore.”

If anything she’d prefer not to be. Recovery, for now, is enough. It has be to be enough.

She hasn’t ruled out going back one day, to stage a miraculous resurrection of her career: the same way the surgeon got her heart to start beating again after she died on the operating table for nearly two whole minutes.

But the thought of starting again, almost from scratch, is daunting. 

And it doesn’t stop the bitter grasp of missed opportunities seizing in her whenever they go past Westminster in the car.

David doesn’t say anything.

The nascent image of watching him tending a rose garden at a sun-dappled home of their own somewhere disappears into the night. Because she can’t have that either, and that’s fine.

“Or not,” she mutters. She swings her crutches forwards, brings her ankles down too quickly in her eagerness to get away from yet another set of disappointed hopes. She’ll be paying for this walk tomorrow. “It was just an idea.”

He catches her arm. “Julia.”

“Look, it’s fine, David, I get it-”

“Get what? You haven’t let me answer yet.” 

Julia drags her eyes back to his. She highly suspects the answer is no and she wishes he’d let her drop the subject instead of drawing out the humiliation.

David steps into her space, close enough so he can move a tendril of hair from her sticky forehead. His eyes -as striking as the day she met him- are as open and clear as she’s ever seen them. “Let’s do it.”

Julia considers him carefully. She wonders if she’s manipulating him without meaning to - proposing a big life change out of the blue and not letting him think about it.

She’s wary of doing that now. He isn’t her PPO anymore.

“You’re allowed to say no, you know. If you’re not ready or you don’t want to. You can say no.” 

“I know. But I’m not.”

“I’m not so much of an invalid that I can’t take care of myself.”

“I know. But I don’t want you to have to.”

“I realise I’m a stroppy cow when I don’t get my way sometimes but I won’t hold it against you if you don’t want to.”

David just laughs, shakes his head. He wraps his arms around her, hands at the small of her back and holding most of her weight against him so she isn’t holding herself up.The relief of pressure on her hips and legs is instantaneous.

“I’m starting to think _you_ don't want to move in with me,” he says. 

“I just don’t want you to agree to something you don’t actually want because you think it’ll make me happy.”

“Julia, I love you,” he says, like it explains everything. And maybe it does. He’s never actually said it to her before. “Of course I want to move in with you. I don’t wanna wake up next to anyone else.”

“If you’re sure,” Julia says, but she’s smiling.

David laughs again, an affectionate  _what am I going to to do with you_ laugh that warms her from the inside despite the cold air. “‘Course I’m sure, you daft woman.”

Then he kisses her. 

“I think we should probably go back now,” David says. His forehead is against hers, and she thinks he could probably talk her into just about anything after kissing her like that.

“Why’s that?”

“Because,” David tells her seriously. He sways her gently, as though they’re dancing on the pavement in the puddles. “I’m going to make love to you in every room of your flat and mine before we move out, and I intend to start now if that’s all right with you.”

Julia breathes out, eyes closed, the beginnings of a tight knot forming in her belly she knows he’ll take his damn fine time undoing shortly. 

“You’re the boss, Sergeant Budd.”

-

“You ready?”

Julia breaks from a daze, adjusting her weight on her crutches. David is standing at the door of her empty flat, the final hold-all of her things over his shoulder.

“Yes, I’m just....”

She doesn’t know, actually. Julia isn’t much given to sentiment or nostalgia, especially not when she has the key in her pocket to a beautiful new home that she’ll share with a man she has strong reason to suspect is the love of her life. 

There’s no reason for her to look back now.

And yet—

He leans against the wall next to him, folds his arms and watches her. “Thought you said you weren’t attached to this place.”

“I’m not really. Although...” She runs her fingers along the windowsill next to her. Looks up at him with a smirk. “This was the first place I ever told you to fuck off.”

His smile is a slow bloom, bringing out his barely there dimples and crinkling his eyes. “Aye, I remember.”

“I’m glad you didn’t.”

“Me too.”

She holds his gaze for a long moment, letting herself love and be loved. The warmth and quality of it soaking her aching bones.

“We should go,” Julia says at last.

“Hang on-” He drops the hold-all on the floor next to the door. “One more thing.”

He disappears into the kitchen. The noises that result a minute later are almost enough to make her think he might be making his final escape from her out the kitchen window. 

But he does return. Holding the plastic planter trough from her window box in his arms like a newborn baby.

“I thought we were leaving that here,” Julia says, half laughing at the sight of him with it.

David throws her a look of disbelief over the top of the plants, her mini-ecosystem partially obscuring his face. “And let the next owner take advantage of your hard work? I don’t fucking think so.”

“There’s no way we’re getting that to the house without the soil going everywhere, David.”

He shrugs, even though it’s his car. “Then so be it. We’re not leaving it behind.”

-

And they don’t. 

Julia has the planter balanced carefully on her knees in the car, the new car interior so far surviving unscathed. She can feel small spots of damp soil seeping onto her jeans from the holes in the bottom. Somehow it doesn’t seem to matter when she’s laughing at David as he sings along to _Rocket Man_ at top volume on the radio while they fly down the motorway.

Julia looks down at the results of her labour, the flowering plants glowing faintly in the sun through the windshield.

It’s taken her a while to see it for herself, but they’re thriving.


End file.
